Inequality and its corrosion of the body and the soul of capitalist
societies has been the hottest topic among respectable liberal economists and
political analysts in the United States since the crisis of September 2008. To
be sure, Left economists have been tracing the twin scourges of flatlined real
wages and widening inequality since the mid-1970s. But it took a major economic
shock to move the most prominent and acute liberal pundits finally to bring the
issue to the front of the line. Widely read liberal economists have over the
last four years written books on the evils of inequality: Joseph Stiglitz’s The
Price of Inequality, James Galbraith’s Inequality and Instability, Robert
Reich’s Aftershock, and its theatrically released documentary replica,
Inequality For All, and Paul Krugman’s End This Depression Now! are only the
most conspicuous of the outpourings of lamentation over what is now perfectly
evident as inequality on the move – the gap between the very wealthy and
the rest is entrenched and continuously widening. The embedded and worsening
nature of capitalist inequality, and the kind of society it is creating, is one
of the major foci of Thomas Piketty’s much-heralded book, Capital in the
Twenty-First Century.

Before the new book, Piketty was known mainly by scholars as the
co-compiler, with Emanuel Saez of Berkeley, of the most reliable and widely
accessed stastistical data on the distribution of income in the United States.
Piketty’s first major solo outing has been a phenomenal smash. Astonishingly,
it currently ranks as Amazon’s number one seller, and is sold out. It’s at the
top of The New York Times best-seller list. Branko Milanovich, former senior
economist at the World Bank, described the book in The New Yorker as “one of
the watershed books in economic thinking.” In The New York Times Krugman lauds
the book’s “serious, discourse-changing scholarship,” and in The New York
Review of Books he calls it a “magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality…
sheer, exhilarating intellectual elegance… Piketty has transformed our economic
discourse; we’ll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to.”
Wow.

What elicits my “wow” is not so much Krugman’s exhilaration, but the huge
disconnect, apparently unnoticed by Krugman and other impressive left-liberal
economists, between Piketty’s analysis and the kind of Keynesianism that
Krugman and his cohorts see as the only path to rescuing American capitalism
from a future of persistent austerity and declining democracy. Piketty’s
liberal champions seem to think that he has vindicated their critique of
inequality by providing a rigorous methodology pinpoint appropriate to the
subject matter and demonstrating conclusively that inequality is not only the
most disturbing feature of capitalism, but that it is far more severe than
previously imagined, and portends a future more revolting than any of us dared
imagine.

Piketty has indeed accomplished all this, but the argument by no means
confirms the fundamental approach of respectable liberal economists. On the
contrary, their bread-and-butter orientation, Keynesian fiscal policy, is
seriously undermined by Piketty’s analysis. And what Piketty recommends as the
only effective remedy he also correctly describes as “utopian,” virtually
impossible under the existing economic system. The book is profoundly
pessimistic, and its author seems to know this. If the existing economic system
makes Piketty’s prescription -a global tax on wealth- virtually impossible to
realize, why does he not question the system itself, and describe the outlines
of a workable alternative? Because Piketty’s conception of the most discussed alternative,
democratic socialism, is inexcusably narrow. He identifies socialism with
Soviet Communism, a model long discarded by all of the participants in the
inquiry into what a workable, desirable form of democratic socialism would look
like.

While I contend that Piketty’s overall analysis is seriously flawed, I do
not slough his book off as merely another usefully informative but essentially
wrongheaded piece of predictable, orthodox neoclassical analysis. To be sure,
Piketty leans throughout on neoclassical methodology, but never on its
essentially apologetic assertions, the big ones that count: that the market
allocates resources efficiently, employs all available resources and that its
rewards, the income it distributes to “factors of production” (capital and
labor), reflect the recipient’s work, her contribution to production. One of
his main contentions is that an increasingly disproportionate amount of
national income accrues to the wealthy who make no contribution whatever to the
production of output. What is rewarded is their ownership of assets,
increasingly assets they have inherited, not earned – and ownership by
itself is not a productive activity. The argument does not proceed along
typically neoclassical lines. Piketty’s case leans as heavily on a wealth of
backgound knowledge of history, politics and even literature as it does on
charts and tables. This kind of intellectual range is almost entirely absent
from the best mainstream contributions. Like Marx, Piketty shows how, for
example, the world’s great literature can figure into the development of a
consequential political-economic analysis.

This book is important and sometimes profound. But most interestingly,
and behind its own back, the book tells us more about the unique historical
juncture at which capitalism now stands than it knows. And much more that its
enthusiasts know.

I want briefly to sketch Piketty’s most important arguments, and then to
spell out what I take to be their so-far-unacknowledged import for our
understanding of the current crisis, and of the realistic options available to
us.

The Main Arguments

Piketty has identified not merely an empirical trend in the historical
development of capitalism. He has pinpointed a tendency, a dynamic movement
inherent in the nature of the capitalist market itself. He argues that
increasingly disproportionate concentration of income at the top, and the
widening inequality that goes along with it, is integral to the system and a
consequence of“the central
contradiction of capitalism,” (Capital, 571) his counterpart to Marx’s law of
the falling rate of profit. Piketty’s core theoretical concept is expressed in
the formula ‘r>g’, where ‘r’ represents the return on capital/investment,
and ‘g’ the rate of growth of the economy. (25-27) In an interview with The
Guardian (April 13, 2014) he sums up the theory: “[C]apital, and the money that
it produces, accumulates faster than growth [of production and total income] in

capitalist societies.” Accordingly, income from the ownership of assets
will increase faster than income deriving from real contributions to
production, from, for example, wages and salaries of working people. Capital’s
share of total income (which is the money value of total national product) will
rise. Because capital can consume only a small portion of its income, the
lion’s share will be reinvested. The return on each additional investment
further increases capital’s share of national income. The very class for whom
Keynes recommended merciful “euthanasia,” rentiers who garner huge rewards for
doing nothing, gets ever-wealthier and smaller in number. The result is
built-in inequality. This condition is thus not static; the disparity will
continuously widen and concentrate increasing wealth in fewer hands.

This dynamic is the way capitalism has to work. There is no question of
policy “mistakes” or a malfunctioning system. Growing inequality ‘is not the
consequence of any market “imperfection”.’ (Capital, 573) Once capital is in
place, it must expand itself faster than output and total income increase.
Piketty makes it clear throughout the book that while this tendency can be and
has been intensified by political agency such as tax reductions for the wealthy
and deregulation, ‘r>g’ represents the logic of unfettered capital itself.
With capital necessarily concentrated at the top, not only will
income continue to be driven upwards, but an ever-increasing percentage of
income will congeal in the hands of the very few. The wealthy need not move a
muscle to accomplish this. Inequality will increase forever because capital is
capital. So much for meritocratic conceptions of how capitalism distributes its
rewards. The wealthy have not earned their pleasures or their advantage over
the 99.9 percent. Because they have done nothing to merit disproportionate
incomes -to merit any income at all?- they do not deserve their incomes. The
chief justification for capitalism’s growing inequality dissolves, with the
clear implication that capitalism’s defining property arrangements are unjust.
(Capital, 264)

Like Keynes, Piketty sees this as more than a question of ethics. Many of
those who read Keynes and Piketty are unmoved by being told that they have
transgressed some principle of morality or justice. For the very wealthy,
accumulating capital is itself a moral imperative. Recall Lloyd Blankfein’s
boast that Goldman is “doing God’s work.” Keynes worried, more practically,
that protracted poverty and inequality can breed popular hankerings for
revolution. Pikkety forecasts that “we will all be poorer in the future in
every way and that creates crisis… the present situation cannot be
sustained for much longer.” (Guardian interview)

Piketty understands that the situation is especially critical in the
United States: “What primarily characterizes the United States at the moment is
a record level of inequality of income from labor (probably higher than in any
other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world…)” (Capital, 265)
Could it get any worse? One of Piketty’s most important original contributions
is his demonstration that yes indeed it can and will get worse. That’s because
of one of capital’s most cherished institutions, inheritance.

Growing Inequality +
Inheritance=Dynastic Rule

If capital’s growing share of total income and total production grow
faster than the economy, and that fortune can be bequeathed to capital’s heirs,
the tendency will be for an ever-larger share of the nation’s wealth and income
to be in the possession of not merely “wealthy households,” but dynasties. That
is, the predominant form of wealth becomes inherited wealth. The heirs are in
the catbird seat. B inherits wealth from A, and in turn bequeaths it to C. But
what B bequeaths to C is greater in value than what he inherited from A.
Likewise, what C bequeaths to D will be greater than what was passed on to him
by B. The series goes on infinitely. And keep in mind that we are talking not
merely about absolute stores of economic value, but shares, ever-larger shares,
of total national income/output.

Inheritors of what will have become dynastic wealth will resemble the
rulers of nations like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, where the nation is in fact a
fiefdom, the private property of a family. The heirs become rentiers on stilts.
That great wealth is earned, that its owners have done something to deserve
their fortune, becomes transparently preposterous. The justificatory notion
that the rich have what they have because they, in Piketty’s words, “work
harder or more efficiently than the poor” becomes patently false. (Capital,
264) It becomes apparent, not an inference from good theory, not the conclusion
of a “powerful moral argument,” that America is ruled by rentiers, the
contemporary counterparts of kings and queens. While it is now a truism that
financial oligarchs dominate American politics, the appearance of a separation
of political and economic power persists. When all great wealth is inherited,
which Piketty suggests will occur, if current tendencies persist, by 2030, the
appearance of political and economic power as two separate spheres will vanish.
There will of course remain the separate institutions of private and public
wealth; the categories ‘privately owned’ and ‘government-owned’ assets will not
be erased. But the relation between private wealth and political power in
capitalist societies being what it is, these formal separations will constitute
a distinction without a political difference.

We are heading, Piketty argues, toward a “hyperpatrimonial society,” the
historical reincarnation of the Belle Epoque, the Ancien Regime or the American
Gilded Age. In such an order, the realities of class rule are part of common
sense and uncontroversial. Piketty claims, strangely, that this is not what
capitalism “should” be about. But he has shown that left to its own devices
capitalism produces outcomes regarded as revolting by all but the super-rich.
Hasn’t he shown that in fact capitalism and democracy are not compatible, and
that the system in actual effect exists in order to enrich the wealthy at the
expense of the rest? After all it’s called Capitalism, not Laborism or
Workerism. The idea is to expand The Wealth of Nations (to coin a term). Wealth
is not income; by nature it belongs to the few.

Piketty has brought to bear on his thinking about capitalism values which
are external to capitalism. Under the regime of capital, equality is equality
before the law. This is entirely compatible with gross material and political
inequality. Bankers are happy to be, along with beggars, equally forbidden to
sleep on park benches. Piketty’s stance is a bit like that of a statutory
inferior under feudalism complaining that under the manorial system there is no
equality before the law. But feudalism is essentially about statutory
inequality; otherwise it wouldn’t be feudalism. In the Guardian interview
Piketty claims “I have proved that under the present circumstances capitalism
simply cannot work.” Work for whom? Of course it doesn’t work for workers. What
Piketty has shown, behind his back, is that capitalism is not meant to work for
workers. It does what it is meant to do, not what humanitarian ethical theory
says it should do. Capitalism has worked very nicely for the plutocracy. They
have never done so well, never had greater riches and never before had
virtually complete control of the State. And Piketty himself has underscored
that this is not due to the system’s malfunction. In generating the outcomes
Piketty deplores capitalism is merely, as the song goes, “doing what comes
naturally.”

I want to suggest that Piketty is confused here, and that the confusion
stems in large part from his misconstrual of the conditions that make for
equality.

The Politics of
Equality

Piketty demonstrates convincingly that the twentieth century exhibited a
secular tendency toward continuous and widening inequality. Almost continuous,
that is. Three catastrophic events external to the workings of capitalism
depressed briefly the steady growth of wealth and reduced inequality. These
were the two World Wars and the Great Depression. (Capital, 136-7, 148, 275)
Here the discussion gets murky. Did not Keynesian social democracy bring about
the reduction of inequality, and in the United States were not the New Deal and
the Great Society brought about by major labor struggles and a wave of
unionization, which scared the pants off the ruling class? Wasn’t the gross
inequality of the 1920s due to wages falling far behind productivity gains, and
wasn’t the relative equality of the Golden Age -the “Trente
Glorieuses”- due to organized labor’s ability to keep wages rising with
productivity? Social democracy and organized labor merit only fleeting mention
(136-7) in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. But in Piketty’s earlier work
he and Emmanuel Saez provide hard data that is not given due attention in
Capital. (“The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International
Perspective,” American Economic Association: Papers and Proceedings, 96,2 May
2006, pp. 200-205)

From the 1930s to the 1970s the share of total income of the top 1
percent declined steadily. Each decade saw a greater decline. During the New
Deal years their share declined from 23 to 17 percent, then down to 13-15
percent in the 1940s, down further in the 1950s and 1960s to 10 or 11 percent
and finally to 9 percent in the 1970s. With the defeat of the New Deal and the
Great Society, the wealthy began to regain what they had lost during the only
period in American history that saw an accelerating 40 year decline in the
wealthiests’ share of national income. In the 1980s their share rose to 11-14
percent, in the 1990s to 15-19 percent, to over 21 percent in 2005. By 2007
their share equaled the previous 1928 peak of 23 percent. Recall that 1928 and
2007 were each followed by a financial crash.

What accounted for this remarkable period when Americans enjoyed the
highest standard of living they had ever experienced, and capital experienced
its greatest defeats? Why this outbreak of relative equality? Militant labor,
extensive unionization, ongoing additions to government programs and aggressive
black activism were essential factors.

It began during the very first decade that saw downward income
distribution. Up until 1934 Roosevelt’s recovery efforts were tepid and barely
effective. The New Deal recovery began in earnest in 1935, only after
the greatest labor actions in U.S. history up to that time broke out in
1934. Among these was a general strike of longshoremen from Seattle to San
Diego, which shut down San Francisco and paralyzed shipping on the West
coast. This is the kind of activism that forces egalitarian legislation.

It was this kind of activism that elicited the National Labor Relations
Act (NLRA, the “Wagner Act”) of 1935, which marked the first time the
federal government unambiguously guaranteed to workers their right to organize
and bargain collectively. The Act declared without qualification labor’s right
to join unions and bargain collectively. Correspondingly, companies were
prohibited from forcing workers to join a company union and from interfering
with union organizing. Nor could they harrass or fire activists for attempting
to organize workers, and they were forbidden to refuse to participate in
collective bargaining with unions.

Government was forced by labor to enact this legislation. During
the debate preceding the passage of NLRA Roosevelt had refused to give the
proposed legislation his strong approval. He remained aloof until it was clear
that Congress was about to pass the Act. As usual during Roosevelt’s first
term, Congress was more responsive to popular sentiment than was the
aristocratic and fiscally conservative president. In a fiery speech in the
House, one representative warned “You have seen strikes in Toledo, you have
seen San Francisco, and you have seen some of the Southern textile strikes… but
you have not yet seen the gates of hell opened, and that is what is going to
happen from now on…” if NLRA is not passed.

The reduction of inequality persisted through the 1970s only because
unions remained strong enough during those years to keep wages rising in step
with productivity increases, militant labor actions occurred intermittently and
black militancy in the inner cities broke out at the same time that strike
actions temporarily ebbed. The inbuilt tendency to inequality analyzed by
Piketty was countered. Profits rose at the same rate as wages during this
period.

After the Second World War American workers were determined not to allow
their victories to be reversed. When Washington attempted in 1945 to extend the
wartime “no strike” pledge, the response was a national wave of strikes. At
least 650,000 auto workers, teamsters, machinists and workers in lumber, coal
and petroleum walked off the job. Elites’ fears that the end of the war would
be followed by the same large-scale labor actions as had erupted after the
First World war were well founded. The earlier strikes had been roundly
defeated with the result that the 1920s featured a small and powerless labor
movement and stagnant wages.

The labor movement after the Second World War had not forgotten the
earlier defeat and was determined to prevent its recurrence. Militant labor
actions persisted into 1946, one of the most strike-torn years in American
history. One and a half million electrical workers, steelworkers, miners and
meatpackers struck. The year ended with a two-day general Strike in Oakland,
California. These actions were correctly perceived by government and business
as warnings.

The unparalleled equality of the years 1946-1973 was sustained by
continuous labor militancy and black insurgence, and would not have been
achieved without it. Militancy waxed and waned, but the throughline was
consistent. The U.S. topped the OECD table in strikes per worker in 1954, 1955,
1959, 1960 1967 and 1970. And surely the dramatic increase in strikes between
1967 and 1971 was a major factor, along with capital’s declining share of
national income, in prompting the business counteroffensive beginning in the
mid-1970s. From 1967-1971 an average of 49.5 million strike days were lost, a
dramatic increase over the ten preceding years. Business retaliation followed:
the Powell Memo urging business to organize in resistance to the post-1920s
order, Carter’s reduction of social programs and deregulation of business and,
finally, the neoliberal age of Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes and Obama.
Government and business were back in 1920s step. Piketty and Saez demonstrated
in 2006 the recouping of capital’s share under neoliberalism.

Strangely, labor’s agency is absent from Piketty’s most recent account of
the Golden Age reduction of inequality. I am reminded of the traditional debate
as to the relative roles of structure and agency in determining the course of
the historical process. Piketty’s signature argument in Capital in the
Twenty-First Century is that the structural organization of mature capitalism
determines greater inequality and a return to the dynastic rule of the Belle
Epoche. It seems to stand to reason that agency is required to defeat this
tendency. A truly effective agency would have to be aimed at installing an
alternative structure, one in which the inevitable emergence of inequality and
poverty is ruled out. Unless Pangloss is right and we inhabit the only possible
world, the forging of such a structure is both possible and necessary.

What we get instead from Piketty is a stunningly lame
prescription: ”What I argue for is a progressive tax, a global tax, based
on the taxation of private property. This is the only civilised solution. The
other solutions are, I think, much more barbaric – by that I mean the
oligarch system of Russia, which I don’t believe in, and inflation, which is
really just a tax on the poor.” (Guardian interview) Piketty himself describes
this solution as “utopian.” It is not as if he is merely urging a US tax on
wealth. He knows that the rich cross borders to evade taxation, so the wealth
tax must be global. In an age in which capital rules with greater power than it
has ever commanded, and State managers in capital’s pocket govern, a global tax
on wealth is the least likely of imaginable political projects. What is
required is a coherent conception of a viable alternative, the virtue of hope
-ruled out only by a-priori cynicism- and political imagination. An animating
vision of a feasible and desirable political-economic alternative structure is
essential.

The only alternative Piketty seems capable of imagining is “the oligarch
system of Russia,” by which he must mean Soviet Russia, not the current
kleptocracy. There is no awareness evident in Piketty’s book of the
illuminating and informed contemporary discussions of economic democracy. Gar
Alperovitz’s detailed treatment of actually existing worker-owned enterprises,
Hahnel and Albert’s defense of anarchist-inflected participatory economics (Parecon),
and David Schweickart’s detailed description of just how a market socialist
economy would work and why it is eminently practical in a way that capitalism
is not, in After Capitalism, must be required reading for someone with
Piketty’s ambitions. None of these alternatives is “barbaric.” Piketty’s
implicit claim that any alternative to capitalism must be “uncilized” in
entirely ungrounded, and in fact Piketty offers no argument in its defense.
“must be”? What would such an argument look like?

The Political
Counterpart to Piketty’s Thesis: The Gilens-Page Study of American Democracy

Piketty’s hasty dismissal of alternatives to capitalism is evidence of
what Pikkety himself seems to acknowledge as his own political naivete. In the
Guardian interview he is revealing: “I could see then that so many bad
decisions were taken by politicians because they did not understand economics.
But I am not political. It is not my job. But I would be happy if politicians
could read my work and draw some conclusions from it.”

We are to believe that politicians now speak only the language of
neoliberalism because they are inadequately educated in economics. The
dominance of the very wealthy in campaign contributions, the overwhelming
lobbying of Capital (sic) Hill by business, the standard route from political
office to much more remunerative work as a lobbyist, the colonization of the
discourse of the press and the Congress by richly funded and highly aggressive
reactionary think tanks – none of these is supposed to shape the world
view of the state managers. They are moved primarily by ideas, Piketty
imagines. Alas, if only they had Piketty’s ideas.

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty argues that “democratic
control of capital” (569) is needed to steer us straight. “I do not see any
genuine alternative: if we are to regain control of capitalism, we must bet
everything on democracy.” (573) Let us pass over in silence (as the wily Cicero
used to orate) that “regain”ing control of capitalism implies that “we” ever
controlled it in the first place. We move on instead to a look at American
democracy.

It’s clear that Piketty understands democracy to work through
“politicians,” who either channel the wishes of their constituents, or
legislate on the basis of their superior knowledge. These are lofty conceits,
but they have something of a philosophical, speculative air about them. If we
must “bet everything on democracy,” why not have a careful empirical look at
how American democracy actually functions? Happily, we now can do just that.

In the world of political science, a major study of democracy in America
has received almost as much attention as Piketty’s contribution. In April,
Martin Gilens (Princeton) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern) released “Testing Theories of
American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”. Like Piketty’s work,
Gilens and Page have introduced original and rigorous statistical models to
measure the influence of various significant actors in determining policy
outcomes.

There are four major theories in the tradition, each attributing
predominant influence to one of four different group political agents. The
standard suspects are average citizens, economic elites, mass-based organized
interest groups, and business-oriented interest groups. Each theory stands or
falls based on the accuracy of the predictions it generates. Gilens and Page
are the first researchers to have constructed a single statistical model
capable of testing the contrasting theoretical predictions against each other.
They bring their investigation to bear on 1,779 policy issues.

Gilens and Page’s conclusions are not consistent with the notion that the
American political system is democratic in any meaningful sense of the term.
“Majority rule” accounts, construed numerically or by any “median voter”
criterion, are found to be a “nearly total failure.” Controlling for the
preferences of economic elites and business-oriented interest groups, the
preferences of the average citizen have a “near-zero, statistically
non-significant impact upon public policy.”

The preferences of economic elites have “far more independent impact upon
policy change than the preferences of average citizens do.” This does not mean
that ordinary citizens never get what they want by way of policy. Sometimes
they do, but only when their preferences are the same as those of the economic
elite.

The authors see their results as ‘troubling news for advocates of
“populistic” democracy.’ “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic
elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose…even when fairly
large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get
it.”

Gilens and Page conclude that “[M]ajorities of the American public
actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts… [I]f
policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number
of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are
seriously threatened.”

There we have the polite understatement of mainstream academic critics.
Actually, the authors’ findings entirely undermine the notion that America is a
democracy. The infamous Citigroup memo’s term is the one the authors’ research
points to: plutocracy. Piketty’s work, with its detailed analysis and
projections regarding inherited wealth, further specifies the general notion of
plutocracy. We are witnessing the world’s most remarkable form of patrimonial
dynasty.

Piketty would have us “bet everything on democracy.” Fine, but betting
wears many hats. If you’re into short-selling, American democracy could land
you a fortune. Think about it.

I want to conclude with a more savory take on democracy. The
distinguished Nobel-winning MIT economist Robert Solow has anticipated some of
Piketty’s conclusions, with recommendations not at all typical of an MIT
economist. In a discussion of the tendency for capital to substitute for labor
in a developed economy, Solow points out that “profits will come over time to
absorb an ever-increasing share of aggregate income… How will we live then?”
Solow surprises us: “The answer seems pretty clear. For the grandchildren, or
their grandchildren, to have a viable world, the ownership of capital will have
to be democratized. If capital is the only source of income that matters, then
everyone who matters -in other words, everyone- will need an adequate claim of
income against capital.” (“Whose Grandchildren?,” in Revisiting Keynes)

Now Solow’s recommendation is not a call for democratic socialism. His
examples of possible income claims against capital are a universal dividend or
expanded pension funds. But it is remarkable that the historical development of
capital to the point of world-historic crisis is so pronounced that some of the
smarter mainstream luminaries are driven to intimations of a radically
different economic order. Solow has recommended an option inconsistent with
capitalist private property. His democratizing of the ownership of capital is quite unlike Piketty’s
“democratic control of
capital,” which construes democracy in exclusively political terms. He would
have politicians indirectly affecting capital through conventional legislation.
But if the use of capital were directly determined by the democratization of
investment, i.e. popular control of the uses to which society’s productive
potential is put, we would be on the road to something that is not capitalism.
Solow has unwittingly set our thinking in that direction.

Piketty, Gilens and Page have taught us more than they imagined about the
direction our efforts must take.

Alan Nasseris professor emeritus of Political Economy
and Philosophy at The Evergreen State College. His website is:http://www.alannasser.org. His book, The New Normal: Persistent Austerity,
Declining Democracy and the Privatization of the State will be published by
Pluto Press later this year or early next year. If you would like to be
notified when the book is released, please send a request to nassera@evergreen.edu